For those not familiar with Sony Vegas, it's thought to be the geek choice for video editing on Windows. It's much cheaper than the heavyweight solutions in the industry, but at the same time very powerful and robust. Let's have a look as to what's new in its 9th version.

I am no movie director by any stretch of the imagination, just doing editing of AVCHD video files of my family on Platinum 8. I'm probably not stretching it. I have a decent dual core AMD with 3Gb on Vista 32bit, but rendering can take some time (obviously)

Is there much of an overall gain moving to 64 bit with Vegas? In overall usability terms and speed of operation?

My thinking is the move to Windows 7 in a few months time might be 64 bit and a good time to upgrade to Platinum 9 64 bit?

I explained it in the article. If you are using *third party* plugins and codecs, these won't work with the 64bit version of Vegas. Plus, there is no 64bit version of the Platinum version, only 32bit. And, the speed bump is extremely small. In fact, on my Vista 64, it was a bit faster exporting with 32bit rather than the 64bit version of Vegas. So I still run Vegas 32bit.

Finally, yes, it takes a long time to export in HD. However, you can speed up your editing/exports by upgrading to Platinum 9. AVCHD was almost re-written for v9, so it's faster to decode. Also, use my tutorial to setup the project properties (something most people don't do properly), and export in HD: http://eugenia.gnomefiles.org/2007/11/09/exporting-with-vegas-for-v...